1. "

    The trading of joy comes naturally because it is of the nature of joy to proclaim and share itself. Joy cannot contain itself, as we say. It overflows.

    And so it should properly be with pain as well. We are never more alive to life than when it hurts—never more aware both of our own powerlessness to save ourselves and of at least the possibility of a power beyond ourselves to save us and heal us if we can only open ourselves to it. We are never more aware of our need for each other, never more in reach of each other if we can only bring ourselves to reach out and let ourselves be reached….

    We are never more in touch with life than when life is painful, never more in touch with hope than we are then, if only the hope of another human presence to be with us and for us.

    Being a good steward of your pain involves all those things, I think. It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows.

    "

    Frederick Buechner

    Source: The Clown in the Belfry

    (via andrewjbauman)

  2. “Soon after I moved to the country, a friend from the city set out to see me and got seriously lost. These were the days before cell phones, so she was on her own with nothing but my directions and a badly out-of-date map. Already an hour later than she wanted to be, she was speeding through the little town of Mount Airy when she saw the blue lights in her rearview mirror. I forgot to warn her that Mount Airy was a speed trap. Busted, she pulled over on the shoulder of the road and had her license ready when the officer arrived at her window.

    ‘I am so sorry,’ she said, handing it to him along with her registration. ‘I know I was speeding, but I’ve been lost for the last forty minutes and I cannot find Tower Terrace anywhere on this map.’

    ‘Well, I’m sorry about that too, ma’am,’ he said, writing up her citation, ‘but what made you think that hurrying would help you find your way?’

    What made any of us think that the place we are trying to reach is far, far ahead of us somewhere and that the only way to get there is to run until we drop? For Christians, at least part of the answer is that many of us have been taught to think of God’s kingdom as something outside ourselves, for which we must search as a merchant searches for the pearl of great price. But even that points to a larger and more enduring human problem, which is the problem of mortality. With a limited number of years to do whatever it is that we are supposed to be doing here, who has time to stop?

    According to the Hebrew Bible, everyone does, for at least one full day every week.”

    Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. (Exodus 20:8-11) 

    —     Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church

  3. "Thou doubtest because thou lovest the truth. Some would willingly believe life but a phantasm, if only it might for ever afford them a world of pleasant dreams: thou art not of such! Be content for a while not to know surely. The hour will come, and that ere long, when, being true, thou shalt behold the very truth, and doubt will be for ever dead. Scarce, then, wilt thou be able to recall the features of the phantom. Thou wilt then know that which thou canst not now dream. Thou hast not yet looked the Truth in the face, hast as yet at best but seen him through a cloud. That which thou seest not, and never didst see save in a glass darkly—that which, indeed, never can be known save by its innate splendour shining straight into pure eyes—that thou canst not but doubt, and art blameless in doubting until thou seest it face to face, when thou wilt no longer be able to doubt it. But to him who has once seen even a shadow only of the truth, and, even but hoping he has seen it when it is present no longer, tries to obey it—to him the real vision, the Truth himself, will come, and depart no more, but abide with him for ever."
    George MacDonald, Lilith (via elnellis)

  4. “The stories of Arthur, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Merlin, of Camelot and the Grail, docked into me like the missing molecule of a chemical compound. I have gone on working with the Grail stories all my life. They are stories of loss, of loyalty, of failure, of recognition, of second chances. I used to have to put the book down and run past the part where Perceval, searching for the Grail, is given a vision of it one day, and then, because he is unable to ask the crucial question, the Grail disappears. Perceval spends twenty years wandering in the woods, looking for the thing he found, that was given to him, that seemed so easy, that was not. 

    Later, when things were difficult for me with my work, and I felt that I had lost or turned away from something I couldn’t even identify, it was the Perceval story that gave me hope. There might be a second chance…

    In fact, there are more than two chances—many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance. 

    And of course I loved the Lancelot story because it is all about longing and unrequited love.

    Yes, the stories are dangerous, [my mother] was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?”

    —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?  

  5. "I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason ‘I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.’ Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."
    C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves 
  6. gaksdesigns: Quote by Ira Glass 

    gaksdesigns:

    Quote by Ira Glass 

  7. "

    We all know that most beloved verse in the scripture, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” But we also know that, if it was that simple, we wouldn’t need the rest of the Bible. The poignancy of what Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego say to Nebuchadnezzar is finally not just what we say to a skeptic, or to a person in pain, or to ourselves, but what the members of the Trinity say to one another. When Jesus goes to the fire, when Jesus faces the flames of hell for us, when Jesus hangs on the cross, what does he say to the Father? Is it so different from the words of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? “If you will to deliver me from the cross, O Father, then take this cup away from me. But even if not, be it known to you, O Father, that my love for you will hang on forever, and that those who somehow find that they have lost you can hang onto me.” Isn’t that what makes Jesus’ final words so wondrous? Jesus loves us so much that he goes to the cross even if there’s no certainty of
    resurrection. Jesus isn’t just keeping his side of the bargain. Jesus is loving even if not. That’s the definition of love.

    We’ve come face to face with God. We’ve come to the foot of the cross, the heart of Jesus. We’ve come to the definition of love. It lies in those four little words: “But even if not.”

    Those words are the heart of God. Make them the heart of your life. Make them the heart of your faith. Make them the heart of your love. Make them the whole of your vocation. In them you will find God. But even if not, in them, God will find you.

    "
    Sam Wells, But Even If Not (via invisibleforeigner)

  8. hours:

    “[W]hen people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language — and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers — a language powerful enough to say how it is.

    It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

    — Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (via marioalbertozambrano)

  9. "Sometimes we do not know what we know until it comes to us through the soles of our feet, the embrace of a tender lover, or the kindness of a stranger. Touching the truth with our minds alone is not enough. We are made to touch it with our bodies. I think this is why Christian tradition clings to the reality of resurrection, even when no one can explain it to anyone else’s satisfaction. The immortality of the soul is much easier to conceive than the resurrection of the body. What? You mean a stopped heart suddenly starts again? You mean a dead body gets up with a growling stomach? No, I mean God loves bodies. I mean that in some way that defies all understanding, God means to welcome risen bodies and not just disembodied souls to heaven’s banquet table. The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God."
    Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World

  10. “This is what gets left out, I was realizing: not just left out of the national political debate but also left out of religious discourse. Politicians talked about welfare—usually to blame and scapegoat—and occasionally made speeches about poverty. There was no shortage of talk about the poor and social service from church leaders of all stripes. But the experiences of people such as my volunteers, the texture and specificity of their incarnate lives, were missing from the story of what Christianity was like now in contemporary America. 

    And just as I’d looked for the unofficial truth, as a reporter on the edges of things, I believed I was discovering, at the food pantry, our people’s significance to the real story. They were on the margins of society, and often on the margins of the church, but their lives were full of meaning. They threw light not only on the overlooked parts but on how the whole system worked. These poor lives illuminated middle-class life—our anxiety, our reliance on managing and fixing feelings rather than having them, our desire to punish. They made clear the limitations of religions that cast out every member whose reality didn’t fit inside church doctrines. Their lives showed the profound resourcefulness and strengths of the weak. The thing that astonished me sometimes—listening to the tales of terrible damage, psychosis, loss—was not how messed up people could be but how resilient; how, in the depths of suffering, they found ways to adapt and continue

    But in breaking bread with my people, and hearing their stories, I was learning about more than politics or religion. I was learning something about God: You can’t hope to see God without opening yourself to all God’s creation.” 

    —Sara Miles, Take This Bread 

About me

a collection of quotations, poems, images, and songs that inspire me